STRUGGLE is a STEPPING STONE: How to Turn FEAR into FULFILLMENT

It will not be the economy that makes you feel the day. It won't be your bank account. It won't be your husband finally gets it. You will choose to feel the day again. Aliveness will be an imperative, and it will change your life forever. The first thing that every single person wants, and you want to draw this triangle out on your notes. I want to see you taking notes. If you don't know these things, you can't sell and you can't build and you can't be happy. You can't find joy. The first thing that we all want is called aliveness. Aliveness. Think about why relationships die. No aliveness there. Think about why you went and worked out this morning. A greater sense of vibrancy and energy. Think about what they teach you when you're unhappy. To become more present, aware. Flow. In my work, we just call it full engagement. To be fully engaged in the moment again, to get back into our body, into this moment, into this second. That's aliveness. Everybody wants it. And the craziest thing is how easy it is. This is what you sell. Does everyone understand that? Raise your hand if you haven't understood that. People are buying energy because they're burned out and they're exhausted. You haven't got quite in the flow yet. Everybody wants more aliveness. You can call it whatever you want. Vibrancy, presence, flow, even joy. You've heard the word passion. All of those positive emotional rains are about being engaged in the moment, in a positive emotion to feel more fully alive. And I know this not just as an academic or as a coach. Twice in my life, I've lost that sense of aliveness because of accidents. Some of you heard my story five years ago. I won't belabor it, but I've been through a lot of injury, physical injury, in my life, and I've lost that aliveness even most recently, just what? In 20, 2012, I was on a trip with some friends and we were ATVing in the desert in Mexico. And I grew up on ATVs. I'm from Montana, from like a small mining town. Any Montanas in the house? I love you. So we're cruising. I'm on fourth gear, driving this ATV down this last stretch of beach about two miles from where we checked out the ATVs we're cruising. We'd ridden technically all day long. I was good, right? We were cruising by and I just. I remember I was along the ocean flat stretch of beach and I just lost a moment of presence. I'd kind of been Looking out to the water, I'd been thinking about my dad. I just lost him the year or so prior, and I just kind of took my eyes off. It was a long, flat stretch. But if you've ever been on a beach and you've been on an ATV especially, there's that thing called flat sand. You can't quite sometimes see the surface and, like, the ridges or the little pillows of sand. And I didn't see it. So I'm cruising along, and I hit this little pillow of sand. The bike immediately leaps up, lands on the front left tire, and I go over. I hit the ground. I start rolling. Thank God I had a helmet, because I remember as I'm rolling, I hear the ATV next to me. So I. And all I thought in my head is, please, God, don't let that land on me. You know, ATVs are like 600 to 800 pounds. Lands on you. I knew I could be paralyzed. I get knocked out. When I wake up, my friends are all gathered around, and they're like, hey, you all right? You all right? And I look up, I'm like, yeah, man, I'm all right. Okay. Yeah. And they kind of sit me up, and I pass out, wake up again. You all right? Oh, yeah, man, I'm all right. What's happening, guys? Sit me up. I pass out again, wake up. They go, you're not okay. Oh, what's happening? Hey, you got an accident. Are you all right? And by this time, our guide was with us, and he's feeling every part of my body, trying to find broken bones, dislocations, feeling my stomach to see if there's any blood in there. And I can tell it's serious because how concerned he looks. And he says, listen, we're just about two miles from where we need to get. We'll get you on this bike, and we need you to get back. I think I'm fine. I'm like, okay. So we kind of sit up and stand up. I feel a little queasy. We get me over to the atv and I go, I think I'm going to ride the thing. They walk me over there, so I just hop on there. Let's go, guys. And I go to reach up to grab where you control the bike. And my hand is completely. I've snapped my wrist clean off. This is a big thing of goo. I'm like, oh, God. That's not. Guys, I don't think I'm okay. They get me back to the thing. I almost passed out twice on the way back they put me in the back of this van. Literally. It's like an Econoline F150 van. Like that. Just a back cargo van. Lay me down on this thing and take me off to this hospital. It's like 35 minutes away and bumpy Mexican roads out by where we're at. And I'm just bouncing back there like a dead fish, basically. Oh, wait, dead fishes don't bounce. Nearly dead fish, I guess they did. So I'm just bouncing back there, and I'm going in, out, and I'm in so much pain, I can't even. And I'm crying. I just can't stop crying because I feel like I'm going to die. And I'm like, I'm not. I don't want to die in the back of a cargo van somewhere in Mexico. Sounds like a movie. I'm not a secret agent or something. I'm just like. Like, this is not the way I'm supposed to go out. But I was really scared. We get to the hospital, and where we pulled up was like, kind of local, little infirmary. And no one spoke any English there. And none of my friends spoke Spanish. Just at the wrong place, wrong time. And so they lay me on this gurney, they take me, and they set me down. And a woman's trying to come up and communicate something, but I can't figure it out. My friends are there, they're trying to figure it out, and they're all got the phones out, trying to translate. No reception. I mean, it's just like. Which is a bad situation. Well, I find out later what they're trying to do is ask me if I'm allergic to any painkillers because they want to help me with the pain. I don't know. I just lay in there. And it takes about 45 minutes for the ortho guy to get there. And he spoke English. So in that 40 minutes, I'm just sitting there, deepening and deepening and deepening into the pain and think I'm gonna die. I can tell something is really wrong inside. I'm having trouble breathing. My stomach really hurts. My side really hurts. When they put me in the gurney, I almost passed out again. Something was shooting through my hip. It hurts so bad. And I remember laying there just thinking, God, how precious life is. I know some of you faced that before where you were in the hospital and you didn't know. You just. You didn't know what was wrong with you. Sometimes that's the scariest health things, right? Sometimes when the health Goes bad and you know what's going on. It's one thing, it's a noble thing, but when you don't know what's happening, that's terrifying. Doctor came in, checked me over. He says, okay, well, your wrist has snapped off. I said, yeah, I saw that. He says, well, you also threw out your hip, dislocated your shoulder and broke your ribs. I'm gonna have to reset your wrist right away. I said, okay. I didn't know what that meant. Sounds good, doc, do what you gotta do. My friends who are all lined up outside this little room and just hear me, resets the thing, puts it in. Turns out later I'll tell you that story, but I am screaming before the meds hit a little bit, and then now I gotta get home. I gotta go home. My friends get me over to this plane, get me on the plane, get me back home. My friend literally carries me into my house. Now, Denise has no idea any of this has happened. So I'm returning from two weeks with the guys. My buddy carries me into the house. She looks at me, I'm covered in the dirt and the filth from the ride still. I'm disgusting. There's blood everywhere. She pulled because she's like, he comes, sets me down on the couch, gets me comfortable, looks at her and she's like. And he goes, see ya. She's terrified. I'll call the Amos. I'm like, no, I'm fine. He reset the thing. It's just. I'll be all right. All right. No, we get over to the hospital, they X ray, my. He had set my hand off. 12 degrees. Yeah. Some of you know how far that is, right? 12 degrees doesn't sound like a lot. He did a real bad job. So they had to go into surgery right away. They had to reset it. They helped me reset my. And fix my shoulder. And I went through probably the hardest six months of rehab I'd had. And then my life really fell apart. At this stage, I'm doing arenas around the country. I've got a best selling book. I'm working with Oprah and her team. My career is going like this and all of a sudden I realized one time coming off stage, kind of like this, I go backstage and usually I go back there. I'm so happy. I got to do my passion, I got to talk with people, I got to help. I went backstage and I didn't feel anything. No, no sense of celebration. I didn't feel anything. The aliveness was gone. Who's ever been there where what you're doing should enliven you, and then it's gone. And you don't know why. I have all the reasons, right? Sometimes you have all the reasons. You got the car, you got the house, the kids, kind of like you. You got an income, you got a great opportunity, and there's no aliveness to it. What is happening? Well, for me, what is happening was my brain was swelling. I had that accident and they checked every part of my body, but they never checked my brain. So over those six months, my brain was swelling. And one day I'm doing a video and one of my. You ever do a video and you notice something later on, something's wrong with you. You didn't know it when you were doing the video and someone tells you something's wrong. And what happened was my videographer, I was doing a video and my eye, my right eye went. I'm talking directly at the camera about motivation or something. My eye goes. I mean, it was goofy. And I was having trouble writing. I was getting really short with my wife. We were having the first major conflicts of our marriage. I couldn't figure out what was going on. So I'd called a friend who had a lot of expertise in psychiatric work, and he told me, I think something's going on with your brain. Go get it scanned. I got it scanned and sure enough, brain was swelling and I had to go to immediate treatment. And you know what's funny? When you hurt your brain, what they often tell you to do is work on your mind and the rest of your body to heal it, right? Because you can't quite get to the brain, so you have to do everything else to improve it. And I got the healthiest I've ever been my entire life in the next year. So healthy. Because they said, listen, you've got to optimize your body if you want to optimize your brain. These two work completely well together. If you don't take care of your body better, your brain will never optimize. And I really finally got it. I finally got that thing that you already teach and you already know here. I know I'm preaching the choir, but I finally got it. Later in the research, we found out that the top 5% of the wealthiest, most successful and happy people in the world are 40% more likely to work out three times a week than the other 95% of people, quote, unquote, below them. Think about that. The top 5% of the most successful people in the world. Not in my opinion, but largest academic study of high performance has ever been done. The top 5% are 40% more likely to work out three times per week than everybody else. Same true for those who recover from all sorts of challenges, physically and mentally. You already know this. I'm preaching to the choir. But that's when I got it. Got my workout back in shape, got my mind back in shape by sharing some of the things I'll share with you today. And all of a sudden, the alignment started coming back. But the most important thing was I didn't make excuses about how crappy I felt. Who knows what I'm talking about? See, what we're all doing right now is we're going, you know what? The last two years sucked. Okay? You don't get to use that as an excuse, though, to get better. It's not gonna serve you to make more or to help your family. Like, we have to change the narrative right now. Our narrative worldwide, appropriately, has been focused on the last couple years, but has to now shift because now we're facing the repercussions. We've gotta change, and we've gotta get in this sense of aliveness again. That passion, that joy, that reconnection. And it starts with saying, I will not talk about how crappy I feel as the reason I can't still show up today. Cause sometimes you can't keep up, but you can show up. Can I get an amen on a weekend I can't keep up with most of you? If I was out there on that super workout today, as hot as it was, oh, my God. I couldn't keep up, but I can show up. You got lots of reasons you're struggling. Still got to show up. I hate that I have to do that in my work. I've worked with parents who lost their kids to cancer. I've lost with teams in military who lost people on the battlefield. I've been in the locker room three times with the losing super bowl team. I shouldn't really say that in public. I think that might not help me out a little bit. I've been on the other side four times. I'm four and three. I mean, hey, that's all right. I got to deliver the tough news. And you know what? The tough news to everybody is always. I know it's hard, but showing up is still required to change. You're not the first one to lose a child. You're not the first one to get sick. You're not the first one to lose your dad or your mom. You're not the first one to lose A limb. You're not the first one to go bankrupt. You're not the first one to really struggle with this. See, our ego wants us to be the first one and wants to use the division of the separateness that the ego loves to say. I'm so different. I'm so wounded and hurt here. I can't. But if you study history and you work with people who really change and find that happiness, they decided they want more aliveness. And the only way to get it was to show up again. Despite those things. Who hears what I'm saying here? Like everyone. Repeat a simple line with me. Aliveness is a choice. Aliveness is a choice. I'm suffering with a brain injury, broken ribs, a dislocated hip, a shoulder that is out, a rip that's snapped off, and a brain that will not work. And I still thank God, had the mentorship of other people, saying, brendan, I know you gotta show up to rehab. I know you don't feel good. You gotta show up. I know you don't wanna work out today. You gotta show up. Aliveness is our imperative. Not just to survive, but to feel life again. Let me tell you one thing that after the last couple years, the one thing that I notice everybody is struggling with is they've lost that sense of how to feel the day. You want one takeaway from today? Write this down. Feel the day again. You gotta feel the day again. You have to use your mind in the morning to feel the day, to feel the blessing, to feel your connection, to feel your purpose, to feel how you want to serve, to decide the positive emotions you want to create with the kids today. You have to feel it again. And feeling it is not going to happen because some external thing's going to happen. You're going to say, I want to feel alive again. Everyone, just say it with me. I want to feel alive again. And sometimes that comes through the service of what you're doing, because I just asked you to say, I want to feel alive again. And some of you are like, but watch what happens when you engage in the service with others. In a moment, I want you to turn to the person to your left and then your right. I want you to shake their shoulders. And what I want you to say to them this time is, you deserve to feel alive, babe. You deserve to feel alive. Go. Who thinks that feels different? Say, that's me. That's why we're here. You first have to feel the day again. Your people need to see you alive and alert and present and engaged and joyous again. And that is a choice. It's a what? It's a what? If you don't show up alive, I'm not buying from you. You don't gotta show up skinny. You don't gotta show up with a six pack, Abs. You don't have to be able to do that Jericho thing. You might not be able to keep up, but you can. You see what I'm saying? Aliveness. Who feels it in the air and the energy? Right now say, I'm here. It's here. You're creating this. I'm not making you alive. You're making your alive. Your brain's going, yeah, man, I deserve to feel the day again. It will not be the economy that makes you feel the day. It won't be your bank account. It won't be your husband finally gets it. Good Lord. You'll be waiting. You will choose to feel the day again. Aliveness will be an imperative, and it will change your life forever. Can I get an amen on a weekend telling you what, what we all want. Aliveness.